Inspired by “Goodbye to All That” By Joan Didion

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

These words by Baz Luhrman, much quoted in essays, speeches, and elegies about New York, have not, to my knowledge, been employed in any description ofHumboldt County that I have read, though I have heard permutatons of it multiple times. Could Northern California be considered the non-competitive sister of New York, perceived as winning by seeming disinterested in the competition? Or is Northern California like a tin foil hat donning neighbor, wandering around the neighborhood foraging other peoples fruit trees?

Northern California is a more nuanced idea than it might seem, spanning the volcanic desert of Lassen County, west towards the green, wet chill of Humboldt County, down as far as San Francisco, and East over the High Sierras to Mono County. Latitude and longitude aside, the terrain ranges from volcanic desert to redwood forest to rolling hill savannah to the Sierra Nevada mountain range. To take a drive, one might encounter lawn signs which profess political affiliations you might not have expected. A fresh(ish) colonization of the Western U.S. exists in the memory of land owners, cattle ranchers, and farmers throughout, who had ancestors that originally tended or otherwise bought and broke in the land.

Luhrman didn’t specify where Southern and Central California end, and where Northern California begins, and if it were brought up as the subject of dinner conversation, it might inspire debate. My first year in San Francisco, That Which Was Deemed The Bay Area And That Which Was Not was a common topic of discussion among locals, perhaps more to distingush them from those recently baptised by the fog than anything else. Locals seem to have a stake in these discussions, haughty and impatient to settle the debate. For our purposes, though, I would assert that San Francisco is the raw hem of Northern California (I would budge as far as Santa Cruz, if pushed).

The city itself lies nearly dead center of the 840 mile coastline of California as the crow flies. Just below the bridge-bound city of 800,000 neighbors squeezed into 49 square miles, past some 40 miles of beach towns and state parks, lies San Jose, an oddity. Rich, but also destitute, beachy, but overwhelmingly concrete, innovative, while mind numbingly pedestrian, San Jose distinctly embodies a Central California vibe. Its not L.A., and its not San Francisco, and I wouldn’t say that its really trying to be either. Maybe its like a neighbor kid who comes over for dinner so regularly that he has become proxy family. San Jose has adopted some of the features of the places in its proximity, but its identity is sort of …murky… and indecisive…but not necessarily insecure. No one goes to San Jose for vacation. Rents are high, public transportation exists, but not impressively so, and reasons for paying such high rent are, to me, opaque, with minimal public amenities. Street level freeways whose speed limit is no less than 90 are part of the rhythm of daily life in San Jose. For those who commute the 180 square mile township among their 900,000 neighbors, driving borders on maniacal. Suburbs and apartment complexes are the common modality for living, and overall it seems like a place that people have families.

Driving North, the Apple billboards stay the same, and the cars to your left and right are Teslas, but the pastel houses, public art, the dynamic skyline draw a dinstinction. Young people and weird people and naked people line the streets beneath Victorian buildings doubling as housing and storefronts. Transportation is both above ground, underground, and by driverless car. There are no suburbs, strip malls, or Wal Marts.

This, to me, is what makes Northern California distinct from its southern counterpart; a sort of rabid protectiveness of it’s sovreighnty from becoming like Middle America. Pride, ego, or practical economic agenda, latent libertarian ideology, whatever it is, I like it.

Housing Berkeley, the Barbary Coast, Judi Bari, and Haight-Ashbury, this locus of counter-cultural magnetism becomes more assuredly the focal point as historical data compounds. To the north, a stones throw from our bordering state of Oregon, is Humboldt County. Humboldt County and San Francisco share a bloodline. Such that you can’t talk about Humboldt County without talking about San Francisco.

San Francisco is like Cubism to Humboldt County’s Abstract Expressionism; where the former is a concise, nicely executed (but nevertheless rebellious) answer to a problem of provincialism, the latter is a trauma response to war, a product of paranoia, radical reimagination, an accusation and response to bloody moral bankruptcy. Humboldt County, as it stands, is a reaction to the gridlock traffic, grimy sidewalk, greasy handshake claustrophobia of the birthplace of the hippie movement. It has served as a place to dream, to cultivate, and to live communally, but these idealistic dreams give way to timber wars, FBI raids, racism both historic and current, economic woes and a resultant black market.

From the flowing beards of babes, professions of a socialist community became, slowly, lectures on the importance of wells of water unspoilt by flouride. While the newcomers had distinct differences from the old, the common thread was some form of distrust for big government, and a wish to do away with any meddling on its part. Consider Waco, Texas, MOVE in Philidelphia, Jonestown, and Rajneeshpuram in Oregon. American between 1960-1980 was swollen with anti-establishment gumption, and many attempts at resistance were met with violence, or they destroyed themselves with internal issues, or they destroyed themselves and then were attacked with state violence. Humboldt pronounces no cults, but favors a crowd of people who, fundamentally, have no respect for the law. Not all of them, but enough to have created an economy, a self reliant community who crowd funded their own hospital, and to have distinguished an area as ‘murder mountain’, a place the the local law enforcement have admitted that they do not police.

These qualities sculpt local politics and commerce. They can determine the moral landscape of the politicians, peace keepers, order makers appointed to government positions in the area, and they can define how the complexities of their jobs need finessing. Simmering tension between environmentalists and loggers, college deans and NIMBYs, corporations and small businesses, crunchy apartment complex weed dealers and polished dispensaries, all are present in the air at any given moment.

I lived in Humboldt County for 7 years. It was affordable, and pristinely beautiful. It was a haven after coming off a slough of attempts at getting by and finding satisfaction in Fresno*, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I came to roost in Humboldt County to ‘heal’ before ‘healing’ was a common avocation. I was not unique in this regard. This is a defining factor in the transplanted citizenry that make up Humboldt. People who want to banish themselves from the grind, or liberate themselves from stock middle-America, shop at co-ops, have goats and form a communal farm, these are the ex-pats you will meet (yet there exists a surprisingly narrow and incestuous dating scene).

The ambition is there. The enthusiasm is there. The ego is there. The practicality, understanding of local politics, and dwindling economy, however, breed a lot of half baked ideas that seem to not pan out. I think this has largely to do with the demographic of the college student population, and their relative age and family situation. Over time, it became difficult to be patient with college students who had plans to Do Something, as my own age drifted farther and farther from theirs. I wondered what the difference was between the people that had been effective here at some recent point in history, and what had gone missing from us. Further, a psychological thing happens when people move from a large place to a small place. The ambition and impatience of youth, combined with the illusion that one might be able to conquer a small town, becomes a propensity for the formation of small, hateful cults of personality. People once overstimulated, now bored, participate in manipulation, character asassination, and general gatekeeping to pass the time. It’s a strange thing about small communities, and the fickle ways that people stave off boredom by stoking flames of unnecessary dynamics, bonding by way of gossip.

Where the rubber meets the road is when someone has so entirely poisoned the well of their relationships that their reputation is unsalvageable. When no more gossiping can get you devotion, when there are no more jobs to be fired from, friends to alienate, or people to stiff, people leave. If they don’t leave, they have an enabling parent, or a well adjusted personality, or an obligation that might force them to change their poor behavior. None of these applied to me.

I had heard of Humboldt County from a friend from high school, who hailed from there and regarded it as a wasteland. Coming from a wasteland myself, I found his assessment to be shortsighted. My young life was comprised of two small towns separated by 8 miles of cornfields, and each municipality was a shanty of suburbs and large corporate department stores. I fail to remember how he described Humboldt, but I think the lack of a KFC was among his cheif complaints. Among mine, about our shared town, the only town I had ever known, were the lack of bike shops, art, fresh food, parks, or bodies of water.

After graduating high school and finding that I couldn’t sign up for the Peace Corps without a bachelors degree, I followed him to Humboldt County for a visit, and lived there in short order, for three months. I remember getting high and watching every Star Wars movie in one sitting, and having a slice of pizza at APD that had a Grateful Dead version of the Last Supper on the wall, Jerry Garcia serving as a stand in for Jesus.

Returning home, I attended community college, worked at a Wal Mart and forgot Humboldt Couty, until my progressive white english teacher showed us documentaries about Palestine, corporate greed, and Guantanamo Bay. In The Corporation, a segment was shown from a Humboldt County town hall meeting, in which citizens protested the building of a McDonalds. After watching, I vowed to transfer to Humboldt State and study art, and exhibit in the art gallery I had wandered into on the campus. After that I would join the Peace Corps.

Six years later, I was back in Arcata, tending goats and watching farm injuries in my palms heal, and occasionally putting them together in prayer, thanking god I had escaped Los Angeles. By the time I arrived, though, Humboldt County had a Wal Mart and a McDonalds, and never once in my 7 years of living there did I attend a City Hall meeting.

ACT ONE: Honeymoon

I felt infinitely blessed at having found a flea infested trailer in Samoa, known for its population of addicts and drifters. I had never lived closer to the ocean, I could hear it in my living room. On a peninsula less than a mile wide, passing other rickety houses with abandoned lawns, I set out for an 8 mile bike ride to school at 6:45 each day, because the only bus came at 8:00 a.m., the same time my first class started. Unless it was storming, which it often was, I could see as many as 10 animals on the way. There were forests in which I could spend the weekends, endlessly green, wet, and quiet, a thing I had experienced exactly twice, thanks to the families of friends who drove thier children places on the weekends.

ACT TWO: Cal Poly Humboldt (Formerly HSU)

I started noticing myself again once school started. My classmates wore no makeup, and seemed mold-sick. My classmates did not turn in homework. My classmates studied art, in their words, to avoid doing more difficult schoolwork. My classmates didn’t know art history, fashion designers, or the major museums of New York City. They hugged to greet each other, came to class late, and considered larrupin sauce an everything-condiment. They were extroverts among each other, professing love constantly, introverts in academia, professing opinions rarely. I was completely out of my depth, but there were so many places to go for walks, and that was enough to make up for everything else for quite a long time.

ACT THREE: Homelessness

It was not, however, enough for my husband at the time. Fascinatingly, this was how I became a statistic.

He did not love Humboldt, neither when we met there for the first time 6 years before, nor when we returned. He did not love hiking, tofu options at restaurants, or going to the beach. He did not love overcast weather, dread locs, or college. I did not like his raging alcoholic fits, murder-suicide attempts, and obsessive doctors appointments, checking for syptoms of MS. He had been bad in LA, unpredictable and cruel. In Humboldt, he became hysterical and dangerous. Humboldt seems like a place where latent issues come to the surface.

Approaching the university with my dilemma, they first offered me a shared room for $900, exempting my two cats. Barring this idea, they handed me a slip of paper that read ‘craigslist’. When I broke up with him, I was 7 months away from graduating. I threw most of the contents of the apartment onto the lawn and woke up the next day to all of it, thankfully, gone. I found a room through an acquaintence, a gardener who dated the woman that owned the goat farm I worked on. In the house were also three men over 60, who had met, invariably, at Grateful Dead concerts. Later, when I would get a job at an elementary school, I would find that the longstanding staff had also met this way, had even conceived children this way. Grateful dead concerts, it seemed, were the bedrock of many important relationships in this community.

Arriving with my Uhaul, I found a girl in my room. The exact same girl who had ben planning to move. This is how I found myself renting an uninsulated, century old barn and sharing it with an ex-hells angel for $300 a month. The first night, I assembled my furniture, opened my laptop to a baseball game, and settled onto my mattress. My laptop promptly died as a rainstorm developed outside, and later I was awakened by a skunk investigating my bed.

ACT FOUR: The Medical System

Finishing school, I was ready for the peace corps, and had accepted an assignment to Senegal. Prior to leaving, preparations entailed lengthy medical check ups to assure I could do without extensive medical attention in a remote village, but the dentist who agreed to see me constantly lost my peace corps paperwork and gave me different numbers each time I asked how many cavities I had. I called my insurance to ask what the co pay should have been for my procedures and he quoted me half of what I had payed. When I confronted the front desk person she wrote an informal note saying I had credit, but refused to honor this later, saying she would never do something like that. Finally, at my last appointment, I was able to get someone (who had recently put in a two weeks notice) to mark the dental chart paperwork off for me to turn in to the peace corps. The nurse who helped me wrote ‘unnecessary procedures, no cavities or major concerns’ on the final line. I had spent over $1000 on the copays, and had maxed out my credit card. I tried to pay it off, but ended up getting in a minor car accident from overworking myself, and had to rescind my acceptance of the assignment, which haunted me for years afterwards.

ACT FIVE: Jobs

When I arrived in Humboldt I took a job at a coffee shop in town. I spent 5 years behind that counter, staring absentmindedly at the people in the juice shop directly adjacent. I was grateful to be out of Wal Mart. My first day, the manager introduced herself as the daughter of a meth addict who took her to strip clubs as a child. She loved men and excused any slacking on their part by saying, without irony, “Boys Will Be Boys”, giving one particular guy employee of the month 4 months in a row(which meant a bonus). This man only ever made lattes, and it was sort of an unspoken rule that men made lattes, and women talked to customers, handled money, did dishes, and cleaned the pastry case.

ACT SIX: COVID

Some years passed and I painted, worked at an art studio, and met a very nice man. I was content, and had plans to move on in short order, until COVID hit. The ensuing years were ones of many latent mental illnesses bubbling to the surface, creating an effect like The Raft of the Medusa. Qualities of the laid back types clashed horribly with the socially conscious ones, and simmering tension boiled over in forests, at marshes, even in adjacent cars. In my home, room mates stayed in their rooms and came out in masks to spend small stints in the kitchen. We felt lucky to be away from the city, where we could at least go to remote beaches and forests, but still, I think the ways that Covid exacerbated peoples idiosyncrasies hit the same, if not a little more intensely, in Humboldt.

I began teaching the year of lockdown and cut my teeth on communicating with parents desperately exhausted with the demands of lock down on their households. Traumatised people from outside the area poured in exponentially, seeking shelter and clean air.

ACT SEVEN: THE INTERNET

As online presence became more palpable, and emotional outpouring became the norm, I was watching the dynamics of the hard hitters in the creative community become more aggressive. I took no pains to take my eyes off the character asassinations and relayed encounters with homophobia and racism that were a part of daily life for some. The landscape of empathy became riddled with land mines. Three particular people who dominated local conversation, people who owned businesses, ran events, or starred in drag performances, openly aired their laundry on their personal accounts, their feeds like the closet cameras in reality TV shows. They shared results of intensive social media investigations of one another, addressing their subjects directly, then talking about them in the third person. It seemed like anyone who had any kind of standing in the community was fair game, and it occurs to me that the same insecurity that drove people away from the rest of the world persisted, even in the small quaint world that was supposed to have been a sanctuary.

ACT EIGHT: THE LAST STRAW

Things drew to a close with the Earth Quake, a 6.2 that shattered the night of the first day of the new year. My particular house, a hundred year old shack balanced on beams in the forest, was condemned. One million dollars was given to Humboldt by the Governor, but after calling the emergency hotline for people effected by the earth quake, I was told there was no assistance available for us. Ryan and I had to move into a studio apartment in short order, and I spent nights chain smoking spliffs on my porch between taking online exams, crawling to the finish line of my online credential program. I left on a high note, finally throwing an art event that drew over 20 people. It was a release of a comic book I wrote with local artists about my experience of constant housing insecurity in the area. After 7 years of putting intense effort to feel some measure of success in the surprisingly lively art community, I felt too exhausted to stay any longer.

Now I am in San Francisco, teaching art and living in the apartment of an old friend. I paint for myself and have no immediate goals anymore. I can see city hall from my window, and I have quit smoking spliffs or feeling paranoid and bored on walks.

Leaving, I felt like I had failed to garner any of the necessary popularity to work successfully in the arts. I had failed to capture the imaginations of the people who had been there long enough to hold authority, or to muster up anything on my own that I was satisfied with or cemented me into anything that felt like a community. I was afraid of the feral independance of the children in Humboldt, raised on clean mountain air and summers in the woods. Their parents also scared me, and teaching was unbearable. I felt like I was either avoiding or giving in to sessions of smoking and hashing out the same gossip about the same people. I couldn’t think of anything to paint, and when I tried I almost fell asleep at the canvas, exhausted from the effort. I walked down the streets gritting my teeth at the idea of running into someone whose attitude towards me I couldn’t decipher through my paranoia and stress, and the trees were boring, and the beach was boring, and the weather was miserably cool and grey. I remembered how much pleasure this used to give me and I felt broken.

Humboldt had not made me soft. It made me brittle.